Sheila K. Adams (NC) 1953- Performer
[Adams is an active, performer and recording artist from the Sodom Laurel tradition. A number of her traditional songs are available at Digital Appalachia, as well as her CD's and recordings. Her main early influence was her great-aunt Dellie Chandler Norton.
R. Matteson 2015]
Sheila Kay Adams was March 18, 1953. She is a ballad singer, oldtime banjo player, storyteller, and author from Sodom Laurel, Marshall, (currently Mars Hill) North Carolina
Sheila Kay Adams (bio from her web-site)
A seventh-generation ballad singer, storyteller, and claw-hammer banjo player, Sheila Kay Adams was born and raised in the Sodom Laurel community of Madison County, North Carolina, an area renowned for its unbroken tradition of of unaccompanied singing of traditional southern Appalachian ballads that dates back to the early Scots/Irish and English Settlers in the mid-17th century. Adams learned to sing from her great-aunt Dellie Chandler Norton and other notable singers in the community such as, Dillard Chandler and the Wallin Family (including NEA National Heritage Fellow Doug Wallin). In addition to ballad singing, Adams is an accomplished claw hammer-style banjo player and storyteller. She began performing in public in her teens and, throughout her career she has performed at festivals, events, music camps, and workshops around this country and the United Kingdom. Other performances include the acclaimed International Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee as well as the 1976 and 2003 Smithsonian Folklife Festival as part of The Bicentennial Celebration and Appalachia: Heritage and Harmony.
Adams is the author of two books: Come Home With Me, a collection of stories published by the University of North Carolina Press and a 1997 winner of the North Carolina Historical Society's award for historical fiction. My Own True Love, a novel, was published by Alonquin Books in 2004.
Sheila Kay has also recorded several albums of ballads, songs and stories including; My Dearest Dear (2000), All The Other Fine Things (2004), and Live at the International Storytelling Festival (2007). Adams appeared in the movies Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Songcatcher (2000), a movie for which she also served as technical advisor and singing coach.
Adams' devotion to preserving and perpetuating her heritage earned her the North Carolina Folklore Society's Brown-Hudson Award in recognition of her valuable contributions to the study of North Carolina Folklore. In a letter supporting her nomination as a NEA Heritage Fellow, George Holt, director of performing arts and film at the North Carolina Museum of Art wrote, "Sheila Kay Adams is the key figure in carrying forward to this day the tradition of unaccompanied ballad singing that has enriched her community for more than two centuries. promoting its beauty throughout our country and beyond, and insuring that it will be perpetuated by younger generations of singers well into the 21st century."
----------------------------
Few people embody such a depth of family and regional tradition, or represent it to the rest of the world with so much authority and affection, as Madison County's Sheila Kay Adams. Adams is the seventh-generation bearer of her family's two-hundred-year-old ballad-singing tradition, and is the mother and teacher of the eighth generation. Her own teachers were her great-aunt Dellie Norton, cousin Cass Wallin, and other kinfolks in the Wallin, Chandler, Norton, Ramsey, and Ray families of Sodom, North Carolina, who have so long been admired by ballad singers and collectors. In 1998, folklorist Dan Patterson wrote in the North Carolina Folklore Journal that "These families have made Sodom famous, out of all proportion to its size." The tiny community is a giant in fostering the folk traditions of North Carolina.
After teaching in the North Carolina public schools for seventeen years, Adams now devotes her attention full-time to music and storytelling. One of the best-known living ballad singers in North Carolina, as well as a fine oldtime banjo player, she has recorded prolifically and performed at many dozens of venues and festivals in the United States and Great Britain. She performs and has recorded solo, as well as with her late husband Jim Taylor and other musical partners. Adams' talent has even caught the attention of Hollywood. She made a musical appearance in the 1992 film Last of the Mohicans, and was a technical advisor and singing coach for the movie Songcatcher.
As a storyteller, Adams also presents her family's heritage to a world audience. Her tales of life in Madison County are full of history and humor. A reviewer in the Washington Post wrote that, "Her stories may be localized or carry you back to the thirteenth century, but their lessons, poignancy, and humor have no boundary, real or artificial." Most recently she is the acclaimed author of two books, Come Go Home With Me, a collection of short stories drawn from life in Madison County, and My Old True Love, a novel of love and family in Civil War-era Madison County. Life Magazine called her book of short stories "pure mountain magic." And, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says My Old True Love is "as passionate and eventful as an Irish ballad."
Sheila Kay Adams won the 1997 North Carolina Society of Historians' Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award, and received the North Carolina Folklore Society's Brown-Hudson Award for outstanding contributions to the folklore of her home state.
In 2013, Adams received the National Heritage Fellowship, the nation's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.
------------------
All The Other Fine Things (May 5, 2004)
1. Young Hunting / Elzigs Farewell
2. Wagoners Lad
3. Drunken Hiccups
4. Little Margaret
5. Sacred Throne
6. George Booker
7. My Dearest Dear
8. Pretty Peggy-o
9. Idumea
10. A Soldier Traveling From the North
11. Pretty Saro
12. 8th of January / Cumberland Gap / 8th Day of January
13. Windham
14. Camp a Little While in the Wilderness